Pilot Light
by amazuppai
Summary: "I can't see," Keith says. He feels Lance stiffen through his grip on Keith's arm, hears a foul word hissed through his teeth. The world seems to pause in its wake.


_**A/N:** I write a fic like this for pretty much every fandom I'm in, let's be honest. One day I'll write something that isn't Klance-y, but this isn't it._

* * *

" _They were hiding underground_ ," Allura informs them over the comms, her voice low and frantic. " _Those sneaky- You both need to get out of there, now_."

"What do you think we're trying to do?" Lance snaps back, pausing as he leans out to fire a few shots, followed by a couple of satisfying _clunks_ as sentries drop to the ground. "We could use a little help. I don't know if we can make it back to the pod."

They don't receive an answer, bullets still whistling past them in deafening surround sound but nothing coming through their helmets. "Allura?" Keith calls, sharing a worried glance with Lance.

" _We're detecting hyperspeed activity_ ," she finally replies, and their stomachs go cold. Altean tech doesn't use hyperspeed, which means some seriously bad news. " _I think… Oh, no_."

"Allura, what is it?"

" _It's a battlecruiser. The others are launching their Lions, but without Voltron, I don't know how well they'll go. We may have to pull back and figure out another way around it_."

"What?" Lance sputters, a moment of guilt passing through him at taking such a tone of voice but too filled with fear to feel bad about it just yet. "We can't stay here, they'll kill us!"

" _Find somewhere to hide_ ," Coran cuts in, " _Stay low until we can come back for you. We'll stay in touch_."

Lance mutters angrily into his helmet, but the connection has already been broken. "Alright," he sighs, "We need to figure out how to get past these guys. The floor's open."

Keith thinks about it for a moment, leaning his head out just enough to get a view of the clearing before them. "We'll have to take the woods," he says eventually, gesturing to the thick woodland behind them. "They won't be expecting us to head away from the pod, and we should be able to find somewhere to hole up, just until they can bring the castle back."

Lance likes the idea about as much as he likes getting shot at. "You want to run blind into an alien forest with Galra on our tails?" he asks incredulously, and Keith glares at him.

"Do you want to stay here and take on an unknown amount of soldiers?" he quips back, and Lance has to admit he's got him. "All we need to do is lose them. I have an idea."

It takes a moment for Keith to map out his idea and for Lance to work the kinks out of it, pausing often to fire back at the sentries and keep them from drawing closer, but eventually they have something akin to a plan, the best they can come up with in the circumstances. It does involve destroying their pod, but it's a sacrifice they'll have to make to secure their escape later on.

Keith brings the pod's link up on his armour as they sneak around to a better vantage point, somewhere they can see the ship. They are infinitely glad that Hunk had discovered this little feature, a way to tether a sort of wireless link between their suits and whatever pod they were using, and while they haven't found it useful yet, have gotten in the habit of pre-emptively connecting them on the odd occasions they take these instead of the Lions.

They find a spot at the edge of the clearing they'd landed in, a rise in the ground where the river flows down and past them, clear enough to see the pod and the sentries swarming below. Keith hesitates, glancing over at Lance, who gives him a meagre shrug. "I'm ready," he says, voice low, "Fire it up," so Keith presses his fingers to the holo-screen and begins to raise the thrust.

They watch as the pod ignites, the sudden burst of engine noise startling the sentries posted around it; they raise their guns as it first hovers low above the ground, then rises, making for the sky, and that's when they open fire. Keith banks the pod a little to the right, makes it more believable, manoeuvres it loosely around a few shots before he lets it go, and with such poor flying it is not long before one of the patrol ships brings it down, a heavy burst of heat and sound as it explodes and rains shrapnel down on the ground below.

"Let's move," he mutters, keeping low as he moves out of their hiding spot to make for the woods with Lance close behind, pausing only momentarily to watch the result of their ruse. Keith catches him looking, spares a glance of his own with a distasteful frown before keeping his eyes forward. "Let's hope that was worth it, otherwi-"

There is a loud blast to their left, a bright flash of purple breaking through the trees, and then Keith screams, thrown back to the ground with his hands over his face, the clear blue of his visor smoking between his fingers. Lance panics, rising sharp and loud in his gut, but he is not new to this anymore; he draws his bayard, memory following the path of the bullet until he catches the metal glint of the sentry perched in one of the trees above them. He only needs one bullet, but he fires three, because he hates this guy in particular.

There is a long moment of silence, the woods around them seeming _too_ still, the pause seeming to last for both an age and a millisecond, but nothing comes. Keith groans into the dirt, breaking the standoff, and Lance finally lets himself move. "Keith," he breathes, stepping quickly over to the hunched form of the other Paladin, now slowly lifting himself up into a sitting position. Nearly the whole front half of his visor has an ugly black mark across it, and the skin across his nose and cheeks beneath it is rapidly scarring an angry, mottled red. Lance tries not to let the fear bleed into him too much. "Oh my god, Keith, are you okay? How bad is it?"

Keith takes a couple of slow, steady breaths, eyes still closed beneath the ruined visor. "I think... I think it's okay," he says slowly, moving his hands further away from his face, still tight with pain but ripe with consciousness, ripe with life. He's not dead yet. "Hurts like hell, but I think the helmet caught most of it."

"Good," Lance says, more a sigh of relief than an actual response. He keeps talking, something about other sentries and hoping they didn't hear the commotion and needing to make use of their distraction, but Keith isn't really listening. He holds his breath at the sharp burn in his face as he tries to open his eyes, blinking them slowly and finding them stinging hot and sharp as though he hasn't blinked in years, but when he finally gets them open, the world is just as dark as when they were closed. He blinks a few more times, reaches a tentative finger beneath the visor to poke gently at his lids. His gut churns with pain and adrenaline and something he doesn't want to acknowledge, but needs to.

"I can't see."

Lance stops dead in whatever explanation he'd been making. "What?"

"I can't see," he repeats, as though saying it again would make it any more or less true. He feels Lance stiffen through his grip on Keith's arm, hears a foul word hissed through his teeth. The world seems to pause in its wake.

"Can you walk?" he asks, for once sparing needless enquiries, and Keith hesitates, judging his options, then gives a quick nod. "Good. I can guide you until we're far enough away, then we can take a look at your eyes. We need to get as far from here as we can first."

Keith nods again, and then he is being hauled to his feet, his head swimming for a moment but passing quickly enough not to be a huge bother, and then Lance is leading him away from the shallow sounds of crackling fire and the heavy fall of metal boots behind them.

Keith has never been blind before. He has trained blindfolded once or twice, but that was controlled, temporary, brief periods of darkness with gentle guidance from his trainer before they removed the blindfold and they laughed about how badly he'd done. This is something radically different; this is not by choice, this would not end after a hard-won fifteen minutes, and there is no sage wisdom to guide him. There is Lance, but he clearly has little to no experience dealing with this sort of thing. Keith appreciates him for trying, because he knows he is doing is best, but it doesn't do much by way of comfort.

He's not sure how he would have gone on his own, though. It is difficult enough trying to function without his eyes with Lance's help, placing things in his hands and guiding him with his voice and Keith still struggling to keep up, and he is not sure he would have been able to make it this far on his own. Even now it is only Lance's hand grasped firmly in Keith's own that keeps him going, stumbling over the uneven forest ground but still walking with purpose, with a direction he cannot see. It was awkward at first, Lance unsure of how to lead and Keith unsure of how to interpret the vague instructions, but they since fall into a pattern, quiet murmurs of _watch the dip_ or _duck for a second_ preceding the path they cut through the trees, trying to get as far from the Galra as they can as quickly as they are currently able.

It has been hours already, he's sure, has lost track in the darkness and the adrenaline ("Nearly two Altean hours," Lance tells him when he asks, sparing a brief glance at the readout in his armour, which Keith translates to just over two and a half Earth hours), and they have only stopped once, pausing just long enough for Lance to assess his injuries. "The burn doesn't look to be too bad," he'd told him, muttering an apology after Keith hisses at his gentle touch around the edges of the wound. "Can't say the same for your eyes. I'm no expert, but a laser to the face in any capacity is probably bad news for your retinas."

Which is bad news for the two of them. Keith already missed being able to see, and he has slowed their pace and therefore chance of survival dearly. "So I'm stuck like this," he sighed, more a statement than a question, but Lance had given him answer regardless.

"Only until the castle can pick us up. We should probably keep moving until then."

Keith had kicked himself back into step, Lance's firm grip the only thing between him and complete misdirection, and he tries not to focus on the fear of it as their feet drag through the underbrush, an incessant volley of _crunch crunch crunch_ slowly driving him mad until Lance finally brings them to a stop. Keith doesn't realise he had been holding too tightly to his hand until they are no longer in motion and reluctantly lets it go, feels the tension that must have been in his grip. "The ground's pretty uneven here," Lance explains, voice seeming too loud in the quiet that has followed their lull in movement. "We should be able to find somewhere pretty easily defensible, and can quickly make it to higher ground when the others get back. Thoughts?"

Keith runs his mind back over any survival training he can remember and figures it's their best option. Most pilots were given basic survival classes, and it seems Lance had at least retained that much. "That's fine," he mutters back, tries to ignore the pause before Lance takes his hand again. He knows he's being grouchy, but he is not being uncooperative, and he is hard-pressed to care either way; his face still feels far too hot and his head aches terribly and he wishes he could just pass out for a while, but he has to push through for now.

Lance sits him down with his back to the cool bark of one of the trees, hands ghosting gently over his shoulders to guide him into place, the sounds of Lance moving through the underbrush around him following until he finally sits down beside him with a heavy sigh. "Well," he mutters after a moment, "This mission officially bunks."

Keith has nothing to say to that, so he doesn't. A long moment passes, not of silence but for lack of speech, because this world seems so much noisier when it is his ears alone that can take it in; birds in the trees and insects buzzing past his head and the wind throwing the whole forest into whispers. He tries not to let it bother him, to clear his mind of it all and _breathe_ , but it creeps in at the edges of his focus, thickens in his skull and constricts in his chest and he needs something to distract him. "How do you think the others are doing?" he asks, schooling his voice to absenteeism to mask the panic rearing its head in his gut.

Lance makes a thoughtful noise, shifting where he sits to Keith's right. "They'll probably be fine," he seems to settle on, but it doesn't sound entirely convinced. "Hard to say, since we haven't gone up against a battleship without Voltron before, but three Lions and a magic space castle have probably got it covered. I'm sure they'll be back soon." He pauses, and in the space between Keith can imagine him frowning, the soft downturn of his mouth. "At least, I _hope_ they come back soon. I'm all for camping out in the woods, but this just sucks."

Keith hums his agreement, already out of things to say. He's tense, almost as tense as he is sneaking between Galra platoons, his fingers tapping absently on the armour of his thigh as he tries to think of something he could do for the next however long it takes until Allura and the others return. He has never thought about handicaps like this before (he has recently had reason to consider amputation as a threat, what with Shiro's current replacement), and he finds himself sorely lacking in the kind of understanding that he had expected from something like this, a sense of peace or acceptance in losing a part of himself. Perhaps it's because he knows it's only temporary, that he won't have to live like this for any extended period of time, that he finds himself struggling to work with it. It still stings nonetheless, nearly as much as the burns on his face. He sorely wishes for an ice pack, or at least a cool compress.

"Is it scary?" Lance asks suddenly, Keith almost jolting at the sound. "Not being able to, y'know… See."

Keith thinks carefully about how to answer, the query seeming somehow more personal than he's sure it was intended. "Yeah," he replies finally, heavy with admission, "It's sort of really freaking me out."

"Wow," Lance says, "You, freaked out? That's incredible." Keith would have usually hit him for that, but he doesn't want to miss and embarrass himself, so he gives a heavy frown in Lance's general direction and hopes that will suffice. Lance lets out a soft laugh, and Keith finds the sound oddly tranquil amongst the mess of audio in his head, a bright blip in the static. "Sorry. For real though, let me know if you… If there's anything I can do to help. Probably not, short of getting your eyes healed, but the thought's there and that's what counts, right? Though I am legitimately offering help, too."

Keith allows himself a smile, something pleasant bubbling up in his chest. Perhaps the pain is messing with his head. "Thank you," is all he can think to say in response, but he means it, and Lance can't help but smile back, warm and unbridled.

A long moment passes between them, but Keith finds it is somehow not as stagnant as the others. Lance finally clears his throat, sounding more like an actual need than an awkward tone, but he can't be sure. "It'll be dark soon," he says thoughtfully, keeping Keith updated of the time while still making conversation, although Keith can feel it on the exposed skin of his face, or at least whatever isn't grossly scarred; the warm spots on his skin where the dappled sunlight has been sitting are beginning to cool, an afternoon breeze lifting in the trees. "I wonder how they're going against that cruiser."

Keith thinks about the other times they'd gone up against Galra battleships, that first ship when they were alone in Blue Lion, Sendak's command ship the first time they formed Voltron, that one above the Balmera. "I'm sure they'll be fine," he offers, Lance giving a thoughtful hum in return. It occurs to him how calm Lance has been, from the moment Keith was injured, and he's surprised he hadn't thought it weird until now. "You know," he muses, "I'm surprised _you're_ not freaking out."

Lance laughs, but this time it is dry, a darker brand of humour. "Oh, I definitely am. I just know when to save the freaking out 'til later."

Keith thinks for a moment, then allows himself a sly grin. "I was under the impression you didn't have a filter."

He scoffs, sputtering a response. "I resent that! I have plenty of filter," he bites back, then at Keith's raised eyebrow adds, "I just… don't often feel the need to use it."

Keith has a feeling that the times Lance _does_ feel the need to filter are one in a million, but he wouldn't be Lance without his impeccable ability to not shut his mouth. Before either of them can say anything more, sound crackles in their helmets, startling them both; a voice begins to clear through the static as Keith quickly puts his helmet back on, Lance not having removed his. " _Keith, Lance, are you there_?" they hear, relief flooding through them at the familiar voice.

"Pidge!" Lance beams back, shooting to his feet in his enthusiasm. He begins to pace, and Keith tries not to focus on the uneven rhythm of his feet. "It's good to hear from you."

" _You too. I'm sorry, I can't stay long. I'm just coming through to let you know we're still figuring out what to do about the battleship. There only looks to be one so far, but it's got patrol ships keeping the planet on lockdown. We're doing what we can. What's your status_?"

Keith mutters something vulgar about where she can stick her status, but thankfully it is not over the comms. "We're doing alright," Lance answers instead, giving Keith a scalding nudge in lieu of the look he'd have otherwise shot him. "Keith's… disabled, but he's fine. We're hiding out a few hours' walk south-east of the landing site."

There's a brief pause between his answer and her reply, just long enough to be unnatural. " _What_?" she asks, " _What happened to Keith_?"

"Sentry got him in the face. The injury's not too bad, but the blast blinded him."

Pidge gives a curse even worse than Keith's, which _does_ come over the comms. Keith almost laughs. " _Hopefully the pods can heal that. Is he there_?"

"I'm here." His voice comes out quieter than he intended, and he hears Lance shuffle beside him.

" _Cool, cool, just… Making sure. Look, I'm out of time, I gotta go. Stay safe, okay? Do what you can_."

"We'll get by," Lance jokes with an easy laugh, able to make light of anything. If Keith didn't know any better, couldn't make out the careful layers in his voice, he wouldn't think that this was even affecting him.

" _Alright. Sorry about this, guys. We'll be back soon. Pidge out_."

For a long moment neither of them says anything, too afraid to break the silence and discuss the bad news. "Well," Lance finally sighs, "That's how it is. Looks like we're staying the night."

"Yay," Keith says humourlessly. Lance laughs, hearty and sincere.

"Oh, come on. It could be worse."

" _How_ could it be worse?"

He doesn't answer for a moment. "We could both be dead or captured by Galra?" he tries, and Keith has to admit that would probably suck a little more. Just. Lance, on the other hand, doesn't seem satisfied by his answer. "Or we could have ran straight into Zarkon, or that cruiser could have taken down the castle and the wreckage could have accelerated through the atmosphere and crushed us to death, or-"

"Stop," Keith moans, "Please," and for the first time in hours he relishes the brief respite from his voice, but it doesn't last long, and he tries to find something to occupy the space left behind. "How are we for defence? Do you think they'll find us here?"

Lance mulls it over for a moment, snapping twigs and dry leaves idly between his fingers. It reminds Keith of younger times, sitting in the sun beneath the trees and playing the debris through his hands, and for a moment he can almost visualise it. "I think we'll be okay. None of the others seemed to notice when that one sentry caught us, so they probably took the bait. We can only hope, I guess, but considering I haven't seen or heard any patrols sweeping the planet for us, we should be good."

That's something, at least. Keith is getting pretty sick of everything always going horribly wrong. "Great," he mutters, shifting into a more relaxed position. Lance doesn't respond, and Keith has nothing more to say; his headache is beginning to get to him, pain still sparking white and sharp where his retinas used to be, and casual conversation is quickly becoming something of an abstract concept.

Lance, in the absence of conversation, begins to quietly hum a tune to himself, just loud enough for Keith to hear but not so loud as to be obnoxious. He doesn't recognise the tune, if it's anything at all and not just randomly chosen notes, but where he would usually find it annoying Keith finds it oddly calming. It fills the space left empty by his eyes, settling his nerves and likely Lance's as well. It isn't difficult to notice that Lance always talks more when he's agitated, has to be making some sort of sound or motion to stay calm.

He doesn't realise he'd fallen asleep until Lance is waking him, more by accident than on purpose, a hand pressed tentatively to his forehead high enough to avoid the scarring on his nose. He only knows it's Lance because he pulls back once Keith rouses, muttering a quiet apology, lucky that he was in too much of a state to attack on reflex as he would have otherwise. It was a narrow window. "What are you doing?" Keith asks, groggy from sleep and trying to avoid the urge to rub at his eyes.

There is a shift in the air as Lance moves back, out of his personal space. "Sorry," he says again, "I didn't mean to wake you. I was just checking up on you."

Keith wants to ask why, but he can tell, by the relative coolness of Lance's glove on his skin and the cold sensation in his fingers and the fresh helping of hot leavings in his brain, that he is probably developing 'complications'. "Have we heard from the castle?" he asks instead, and he feels more than hears Lance shaking his head.

"Not yet," he sighs, sounding worn out from the battle and the wait, "But I haven't seen anything of the Galra yet either, so that's something. It's a good-news-bad-news kind of thing."

Keith gives a thoughtful hum, a non-answer, slipping into his own thoughts in his fever-addled mind. He doesn't remember falling asleep, but he does remember dreaming, vague images flickering through his memory. He'd dreamt about the incident that lead them to where they are now, looking on as a bystander as he and Lance ran through the woods, watched himself get shot and collapse. He imagines it being Lance in his position, imagines being the one to lean over him with a hand on his shoulder, imagines the bullet hitting lower and killing instead of disabling. He thinks about what would have happened if he had been alone, managing to get past the Galra but stymied by the injury, stumbling through alien woods with nothing to guide him, groping miserably between the trees with no goal in reach. He remembers how Lance's hand had felt in his own, gently pulling him along, firm and solid. "Lance," he begins, pauses, takes a breath. "I want to... Thanks."

There is a long moment where for a second Keith worries that he's not going to reply, that Lance thinks it was stupid and he should have kept his mouth shut, but then Lance scoffs lightly. "For what? Being a decent human being? I wasn't gonna leave you for dead, man. You'd be running around in the woods bumping into trees and cursing in the vague direction of the sky."

Keith imagines the scenario in his head, and admittedly finds it a little humorous once he gets past the idea of it being _him_ and Galra being nearby. "But seriously," he insists, "I appreciate it. I know you're trying your hardest to help me out here."

"Dude, you're making this weird. Don't make it weird. I don't know how long we'll be stuck here in the weirdness."

"Oh, shut up," Keith snaps back, but there's no malice behind it, and he finds himself smiling a little. Lance sticks his tongue out in retaliation, exaggerating the sound effect for Keith's benefit, who then shakes his head, and for a second they savour the moment, light-hearted in the darkness of the planet. Keith tries to prompt himself to continue his outward thought process. "I guess I'm just a little shaken up by this. Neither of us saw that sentry up there, and it could have gone a lot worse. If it had shot lower or this armour was less durable, I could have died. It's... scary."

"And that's why you should always wear a helmet," Lance says, and Keith wants to hit him. He doesn't. Lance's tone sombres up on its own. "I get it, though. When Sendak attacked I was too unconscious to really focus on it at the time, but it really freaked me out. I sort of realised that anything could happen at any time, and there was never any guarantees that you wouldn't get hurt." He pauses for a moment, catches what he's saying, and laughs dryly at himself. "That sounds pretty depressing when I say it like that, but that's not how I meant it. It's the sort of revelation that's helped me come to terms with a lot of stuff, about being a Paladin and saving the universe and whatever."

Keith understands what he's getting at, thinks about it for a while, tries to see it as Lance does. He's still locked in the fear now, but he begins to feel that maybe, in time, he'll be able to see it the same way. "Who knew you were so deep?" he jokes, but just as Lance begins to voice his protests there is a low sound from somewhere distant, crackling in bright bursts, Lance making a small surprised noise as it starts. "What is that?" Keith asks, nerves rising up and preparing to jump to his feet in a moment.

"Something just exploded above the planet," Lance explains, and while there is caution in his voice, he doesn't seem overly nervous. "I'm _hoping_ it was the battleship, but they're too far away to tell."

The moment Keith opens his mouth to ask what they should do, their helmets buzz to life with sound, startling them both. " _Keith, Lance_ ," Shiro says, out of breath but upbeat and thick with triumph. They can hear the others whooping excitedly in the background. " _The Galra cruiser's been taken care of. How are you guys holding up_?"

"Fine before and better now," Lance beams, relief flooding through both of them. "You guys all okay?"

" _We're all fine_ ," he assures. " _We've locked onto your positions and we're coming down to get you. The Galra forces on the planet are pretty thin and shouldn't be a problem to bypass_."

"You're a champ," Lance tells him, then they end the communication. Keith smiles as Lance sighs happily, a long breath letting out all the tension he'd been holding since the previous afternoon. Keith puts his hand out, held palm-up between them; Lance places his hand firmly on top, linking them together. "Come on, buddy," he grins, "We're getting out of here."


End file.
